Software Studies

Guiding and transforming our creative practices, this paper argues for a critical investigation of the techno‐material affordances at play in doing visual research with digital media. It interrogates how software and skill might interact to mediate creative engagements with digital materialities. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies of and with the Korsakow System – an authoring system for creating generative multiple links between media assets – I show how software combined with other imaging technologies can (re‐)focus attention and action towards the intangible workings of digital code. Three exercises will demonstrate how a skilled mediation with relational media systems challenges and complements ethnographic filmmaking through the adoption of iterative software and design methodologies. Rather than gaining control over code, the aim is to gain control over the loss of it in the field and in front of the screen. In the context of an advancing digital visual ethnography, such a skilled mediation affords an experiential and responsive mode of knowledge production sensitising us to the complexly layered affordances and constraints of digital materialities and the dynamic density of relations in which they are entangled.

Affection games are ludic experiences in which players are required to express culturally recognized expressions of liking as a primary goal in the game. Interestingly, while the physical world of analog play has many such activities, the digital world has been relatively limited in affording players the ability to express affection as the primary game goal. Affection games in digital play exist as somewhat esoteric clusters across a variety of cultures and super genres. This paper defragments the diverse set of affection games, collecting, cataloging and describing the games in detail. The paper provides a content analysis of affection games and an overview of their preponderance on the web. This paper organizes affection games into a simple classification based on their game verbs. These are flirting, hugging, kissing, and sexual affection. The content analysis provides the attributes through which the affection games are clustered. Notable patterns from the content analysis include indications that kissing and sexual affection are most common, while hugging games are the rarest. There is also a strong coupling of targeted gender identification and the types of affection made playable. These patterns are indicated both in the spaces in which they are distributed and in their content.

The demands for cost-effective information and communications technology solutions within the prevailing economic flux and instability calls for both new and radical approaches to cope with contemporary business challenges. The rapid pace of technology innovation notwithstanding is making technology choices even more difficult. The time to recoup return on investments seems unforgiving and justification for every extra dollar for information systems and technology investments prove more ambitious and difficult for chief information officers. Often overlooked by industry specialists are the immense benefits that open source software presents to enterprises. Open source is relatively cost-effective, adaptable, scalable, and secure. Open source software use a bazaar development methodology that incorporates durability and functionality in more advanced and secure ways than traditional proprietary software. Yet, information and communications technology professionals seem too reluctant to engage their benefits because of a lackluster attitude toward learning "innovative" endeavors. However, with prevailing cost-cutting measures, ignoring alternative cost-effective solutions are becoming less of an option to respective stakeholders. Free and open source software will therefore gain the recognition it genuinely deserve as the software of choice for scalable and costsensitive implementation and use. Free and open source software is the appropriate driver for organizational strategic endeavors in the face of a grueling world of globalizations and the phenomenological socio-technical principles and practices that governs business sustainability and longevity in the post-modern era.

Institutions of modern culture that are responsible for selecting what makes it into the canon of our cultural memory and what is left behind are always behind the times. It may take a few decades or even longer for a new field which is making an important contribution to modern culture to “make it” into museums, books and other official registers of cultural memory. In general, our official cultural histories tend to privilege art (understood in a romantic sense as individual products an individual artists) over mass industrial culture. For instance, while modern graphical and industrial designers do have some level of cultural visibility, their names, with the exception of a few contemporary celebrity designers such as Bruce Mau and [Philip Stark are generally not as known as the names of fine artists or fiction writers. Some examples of key contemporary fields that so far have not been given heir due are music videos, cinematography, set design, and industrial design. But no cultural field so far remained more unrecognized than computer science and, in particular, its specific branch of human-computer interaction, or HCI (also called human-computer interface design, or HCI).
It is time that we treat the people who have articulated fundamental ideas of human-computer interaction as the major modern artists. Not only they invented new ways to represent any data (and thus, by default, all data which has to do with “culture,” i.e. the human experience in the world and the symbolic representations of this experience) but they have also radically redefined our interactions with all of old culture. As a window of a Web browser comes to supplement cinema screen, a museum space, a CD player, a book, and a library, the new situation manifest itself: all culture, past and present, is being filtered through a computer, with its particular human-computer interface. Human-computer interface comes to act as a new form through which all older forms of cultural production are being mediated.

As a book of design theory, The Stack invites several questions. In The Stack, each layer is capable of being redesigned, and in the process of redesigning the layers, Bratton em‐ phasizes the value of accidents, inverting Paul Virilio’s axiom to read, “the accident also produces a new technology” (17). [2] If The Stack is a model for understanding contem‐ porary geopolitics and each layer is capable of being redesigned, then who is the target audience of the book? Designers with geopolitical interests or political geographers seeking design inspiration? If The Stack is a “totality that is resistant to totalitarianism” (69) and the effects incurred by redesign are likely to be accidental, then how are we to understand the proliferation of accidents among multiple totalities? Where is the theory of accidents that clarifies these collisions?

This article provides an analysis of the application software Photoshop with a specific focus on how reviews serve as sites for mediating its cultural subjectivities. The first sections develop a conceptual framework for the research based on mediation theory followed by a more detailed discussion of how tracing Photoshop’s cultural biography can be used to analyze its mediation in a way that recognizes its status as part of technological processes and social contexts. The later sections apply this framework with a specific focus on Photoshop upgrades and how they are reviewed in magazine articles and newsgroups over the course of nearly 20 years.

and visiting researcher at Open University of Catalonia (UOC/Spain) funded by the CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil, Brasília. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during an open question session on his site, gave a very interesting answer about how he understands human social relationships:

In this article, I inquire into Facebook’s development as a platform by situating it within the transformation of social network sites into social media platforms. I explore this shift with a historical perspective on, what I refer to as, platformization, or the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web and its consequences. Platformization entails the extension of social media platforms into the rest of the web and their drive to make external web data “platform ready.” The specific technological architecture and ontological distinctiveness of platforms will be examined by taking their programmability into account. I position platformization as a form of platform critique that inquires into the dynamics of the decentralization of platform features and the recentralization of “platform ready” data as a way to examine the consequences of the programmability of social media platforms for the web.

Videogames were once made with a vast range of tools and technologies, but in recent years a small number of commercially available 'game engines' have reached an unprecedented level of dominance in the global videogame industry. In particular, the Unity game engine has penetrated all scales of videogame development, from the large studio to the hobbyist bedroom, such that over half of all new videogames are reportedly being made with Unity. This book provides an urgently needed critical analysis of Unity as ‘cultural software’ that facilitates particular production workflows, design methodologies, and software literacies. Building on long-standing methods in media and cultural studies, and drawing on interviews with a range of videogame developers, Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh argue that Unity deploys a discourse of democratization to draw users into its ‘circuits of cultural software’. For scholars of media production, software culture, and platform studies, this book provides a framework and language to better articulate the increasingly dominant role of software tools in cultural production. For videogame developers, educators, and students, it provides critical and historical grounding for a tool that is widely used yet rarely analysed from a cultural angle.

At first glance apps do seem rather trivial. They are abundant, cheap, or free and often serve limited functions. They can have a rapid rise from obscurity to overnight success, but they fade quickly as different apps emerge, tastes change, or as operating systems update and force obsolescence. Most apps are built to solve mundane, everyday problems: keeping track of one’s schedule, waking up, remembering the milk, taking notes, planning workouts. But the quotidian activities they influence and encompass are far from banal: connecting with friends (and strangers), sharing memories (and personally identifying information), making art (and trash), navigating spaces (and reshaping places in the process). Although the sheer number of apps may be overwhelming, as are the range of activities they address, each one offers an opportunity for media and cultural studies scholars to seek out meaning in the mundane. Rather than treat apps as frivolous or incidental, what in- sights reveal themselves if we take apps seriously, as a specific manifestation of software, as a vector for popular culture, and as a particular aesthetic and functional presentation of code that has expanded the market for software and further integrated it into leisure, commercial, educational, interpersonal, and other spheres of everyday activity?

Traducción de Software Takes Command (versión del 30 de septiembre de 2012, publicada bajo licencia Creative Commons en manovich.net) por Everardo Reyes-García. Este documento tiene únicamente intenciones educativas, artísticas y científicas.

The theme of the software that we have been developing is a combination of Mobile Solutions and Leveraging Geo data and Maps to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful to a wider and better extent. Our project is a mobile application that allows the user to download and install street maps of a particular city, state or country depending on his current needs from a site .The downloaded maps can be browsed offline by the user and the user can download new maps or update the existing ones whenever he feels the need to do so. The downloaded maps will be dynamic giving the user the feel as if he is browsing the maps online. The user's current location will be shown on the map using the cell tower info that is provided by all the cell network providers thus making the application usage completely independent of internet service. The downloaded maps will not be like some image of a street map but like a fully functional and active map that allows the user to search for a particular place like some mall, or some spot for tourist interest by just speaking the name of the place which will be processed by the speech recognition system which is a great feature of our application specially useful for people who don't know how to read or write in English .The result produced by the application will be a shortest by road route to the place which will be highlighted on the map ,the distance and the estimate cost of reaching there by a cab or a bus service, any transportation means like a bus stand or a taxi stand in the close vicinity of the users current location will be highlighted in the map. The cursor on the map indicating the user's current location will move along with the user as he travels thus providing him real time information of his location.

This book provides a cutting-edge introduction to Internet-facilitated crime-watching and examines how social media have shifted the landscape for producing, distributing, and consuming footage of crime. In this thought-provoking work, Mark Wood examines the phenomenon of antisocial media: participatory online domains where footage of crime is aggregated, sympathetically curated, and consumed for entertainment. Focusing on Facebook pages dedicated to hosting footage of street fights, brawls, and other forms of bareknuckle violence, Wood demonstrates that to properly grapple with antisocial media, we must address not only their content, but also their software. In doing so, this study goes a long way to addressing the fundamental question: how have social media changed the way we consume crime?

Synthesizing criminology, media theory, software studies, and digital sociology, Antisocial Media is media criminology for the Facebook age. It is essential reading for students and scholars interested in social media, cultural criminology, and the crime-media interface.

Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009) suggests that falling in (to) color is a falling into embodiment, sensuality and the pain of a lover’s loss. Unfolding on November 30, 1962, the day George Falconer (Colin Firth) plans to commit suicide, the film shows the last 24 hours of his life as a gradual reawakening or attunement to the surfaces of the world. The film’s fetishistic attention to texture, detail and color suggests that cinema’s capacity to isolate, focalize and reframe enables a phenomenal openness to the world that is not unlike the experience of falling in love, while its celebration of color aesthetics—its chromophilia—stages three different modalities in the history of color.  First, its production design, technological capacities and selective color saturation and desaturation exemplify the contemporary era’s digital capacity to manipulate color, while simultaneously signaling a reflexive anxiety about the problem of color stability for analog film, with implications for the digital era. Second, the intermedial color design of the film’s period setting in the early sixties nostalgically mourns the passing of an earlier technological regime in which Technicolor was marked as fantastic, at the very historical moment when cinema and television shifted from black and white to Eastmancolor as normative register. Third, in its Pop Art-inflected attention to chromatic surface and its textual allusions to Aldous Huxley’s novels and to psychedelic vision, it explores new cultural concerns with perception and the expansion of consciousness. A Single Man aestheticizes a contemporary shift in the moving image from actuality to potentiality, as one in which color acts as a signifier of appearance and disappearance, reflexively foregrounding the materiality of surface. By extension, through its progressive saturation and desaturation (or color ‘blooming’), it draws attention to the fragile and fugitive nature of analog color processes, yet also promises through its digital capacities that all might be retroactively restored. For at this historical moment marked by the ‘death of cinema’ and the shift to digital production, distribution and exhibition, color not only digitally alters but also can figuratively renew.

To understand media today we need to understand media software – its genealogy (where it comes from), its anatomy (interfaces and operations), and its practical and theoretical effects.1 How does media authoring software shape the media being created, making some design choices seem natural and easy to execute, while hiding other design possibilities? How does media viewing / managing / remixing software affect our experience of media and the actions we perform on it? How does software change what “media” is conceptually?

This article approaches some of these questions via the analysis of a software application that has become synonymous with “digital media” – Adobe Photoshop. Like other professional programs for media authoring and editing, Photoshop’s menus contain many dozens of separate commands. If we consider that almost all the commands contain multiple options that allow each command do a number of different things, the complete number runs into thousands.

Trata-se de uma pesquisa de estado da arte que possa ajudar a refletir sobre o papel do software na midiatização da ciência. Divide-se em três eixos: midiatização, ciência e culturas digitais. Investigamos teses, dissertações, artigos e trabalhos apresentados em eventos.

From the publisher: "Software has replaced a diverse array of physical, mechanical, and electronic technologies used before 21st century to create, store, distribute and interact with cultural artifacts. It has become our interface to the world, to others, to our memory and our imagination - a universal language through which the world speaks, and a universal engine on which the world runs. What electricity and combustion engine were to the early 20th century, software is to the early 21st century. Offering the first theoretical and historical account of software for media authoring and its effects on the practice and the very concept of 'media,' the author of The Language of New Media (2001) develops his own theory for this rapidly-growing, always-changing field. What was the thinking and motivations of people who in the 1960 and 1970s created concepts and practical techniques that underlie contemporary media software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya, Final Cut and After Effects? How do their interfaces and tools shape the visual aesthetics of contemporary media and design? What happens to the idea of a 'medium' after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended in software? Is it still meaningful to talk about different mediums at all? Lev Manovich answers these questions and supports his theoretical arguments by detailed analysis of key media applications such as Photoshop and After Effects, popular web services such as Google Earth, and the projects in motion graphics, interactive environments, graphic design and architecture. Software Takes Command is a must for all practicing designers and media artists and scholars concerned with contemporary media."

AI plays a crucial role in the global cultural ecosystem. It recommends what we should see, listen to, read, and buy. It determines how many people will see our shared content. It helps us make aesthetic decisions when we create media. In professional cultural production, AI has already been adapted to produce movie trailers, music albums, fashion items, product and web designs, architecture, etc. In this short book, Lev Manovich offers a systematic framework to help us think about cultural uses of AI today and in the future. He challenges existing ideas and gives us new concepts for understanding media, design, and aesthetics in the AI era.

Exploring one million manga pages on the 287 megapixel HIPerSpace (The Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Space) at Calit2, San Diego. HIPerSpace offers 35,840 x 8,000 pixels resolution (287 megapixels) on a 31.8 feet wide and 7.5 feet tall display wall made from 70 monitors. This photo: Jeremy Douglass (Post-doctoral researcher, Software Studies Initiative) and Florian Wiencek (Jacobs-University, Bremen) zooming into a manga visualization.

Digital sound synthesis can be described in terms of discrete operations applied to signals according to given criteria. The process of organising such operations can be subject to creative variation and generative algorithms. This article presents proposals for how a sound construction process can be thought of as a combination of synthesis and applied transformations. Operational spaces are examined and how process configuration and incompleteness can serve as creative models for synthesis. Properties of sound streams are also considered and how they can involve liveness and unpredictability. A software framework is finally introduced followed by a reflection on its use in creative practice.

Pomerantz is an information scientist who studies metadata as an object of interest generally, within the information science domain. Yet the implications, the phenomena, and the developments the book covers have important insights for media and communications studies. As such, Jeffrey

The chapter aims to offer a polemic contribution to critical Internet scholarship by analysing social media as  cultural texts, and situating such analysis within the wider political economy of the Internet. Arguing against ideologies of the transparent often reflected in academic approaches to social media, the paper explores them as part of the Internet's wider mediating structures and monopoly power. Instead of approaching them as a seamless tools with open architectures, it struggles with its discourses by being critically attentive to the representational structures of their interfaces and design as well as its less visually anchored stories.

The thesis examines how information technologies have changed the practice of curating. It proposes an interdisciplinary approach that directly links curating (often understood as an activity of artistic programming), computing (the activity of computer programming) and a relatively recent interest in software art (in which programming is understood as artistic practice). Although there is much contemporary critical work and practice that is described as art-oriented programming or software art, the thesis aims to explore a perceived gap in discussions around software curating.
Curators working with online technologies are presented with the challenge of how to respond to new artistic forms that involve programming: for instance program-objects that display dynamic and transformative properties, and that are distributed over socio-technological networks. Although there are many examples of social platforms and highly relevant examples of online ‘art platforms’, these still largely operate in display mode replicating more conventional models of curating and the operations of art institutions in general. The tendency is for these curatorial online systems to concentrate on the display of executed code and pay less attention to source code. New sensibilities are required that simultaneously reflect the significance of source code as art, and software not as a production tool or a display platform but as cultural practice that is analogous to curating. What is distinctive about the thesis is that it speculates on a curatorial model that emphasises the analogy to programming. Consequently, the thesis argues for online software systems that display properties of curating but reprocess established definitions by deliberately collapsing firm distinctions between the fields of programming, artistic practice and curatorial practice.
To consider these issues, the thesis brings together a number of inter-related fields of critical inquiry and situates curating in the context of theories of immateriality, a critical discourse around software art practice, and an understanding of open systems. The key issue for the thesis becomes how power relations, control and agency are expressed in new curatorial forms that involve programming and networks; in other words, the thesis is concerned with the politics of curating in/as (an) open system(s). Indeed, curating itself can be described in terms of open systems, implying a state in which there is continuous interaction with the socio-technological environment. The system is opened up to communicative processes that involve producers/users and to divergent exchanges that take place and that disrupt established social relations of
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production and distribution. Thus, and importantly for an understanding of the power relations involved, software opens up curating to dynamic possibilities and transformations beyond the usual institutional model (analogous to the model of production associated with the industrial factory) into the context of networks (and what is referred to by the Autonomists as the ‘social factory’). The suggestion is that the curatorial process is now closely integrated with the dynamic socio-technological networks and with software that is not simply used to curate but demonstrates the activity of curating in itself. Consequently, the thesis offers an expanded description of curating with respect to software in which agency is reconstituted to include alternative dynamics of networks.
The curatorial model is not only theorised but also deployed in the production of experimental software for curating source code (kurator) that forms the practical part of the doctoral research. In addition to a written thesis and software, two further projects produced during the registration period 2002-2008 are included in support of the overall thesis: a conference Curating, Immateriality, Systems (CIS) (Tate Modern, London 2005) and an edited book Curating Immateriality: The Work of The Curator in the Age of Network Systems (CI) (Autonomedia, New York 2006). The kurator software is a further development of the conference and subsequent book, and offers an online, user-moderated curatorial system for further public modification. In so doing, the argument is that the curatorial process is demonstrably a collective and distributed executable that displays machinic agency. This is what is referred to in the thesis as software curating.

Software development paradigms help a software developer to select appropriate strategies to develop software projects. They include various methods, procedures, and tools to describe and define the software development life cycle (SDLC). The waterfall and iterative models are two useful development paradigms, which have been used by various software developers in the last decades. This paper proposes a new software development methodology, called waterative model, which applies an integration of the waterfall and iterative development paradigms. In this model, the iterative model is embedded into the waterfall model to use the advantages of both models as an integrated one. It, in the most cases, is appropriate for large software products that need a long-term period of time for the development process. Experimental results demonstrate that the customer satisfaction score could be high by using the proposed model in various software projects.

In this chapter we want to reflect on the concept of affordance as a key term for understanding and analysing social media interfaces and the relations between technology and its users. We first describe five different–but related–ways in which affordance has been conceptualized and subsequently address how it has been employed to analyse social media in particular. We then outline a platform-sensitive approach to affordance as an analytical tool for examining social media based on recent examples of changes to the Twitter platform. Our approach is sensitive to the medium-specificity of platforms, as technological intermediaries and entities that can be built upon, and which draw different stakeholders together and orchestrate their relationships to each other (Gillespie, 2010; Helmond, 2015). Such a perspective requires taking into account how affordances relate not only to end-users and their activities but also to third-parties such as developers who extend the affordances offered by the platform, and advertisers who monetize platform activities. Affordances, we argue, manifest in relations between platforms and their different types of users—end-users, advertisers, developers, and researchers. We extend previous conceptualizations of affordances understood as the action possibilities made available to users by means of technology, not only by expanding the notion of the user, but also by considering the question of what users do to the technology.

548 pages.
https://thenewnormal.strelka.com/publication-preview
https://strelkamag.com/en/article/strelka-institute-unveils-the-new-normal-book

The New Normal (2017-2019) was a post-graduate program and Speculative Urbanism think-tank within Moscow’s renowned Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture, and Design. Directed by distinguished American social theorist Benjamin H. Bratton, the The New Normal conducted a collaborative research to investigate the impact of planetary-scale computation on the future of cities both in Russia and around the world.

The New Normal book, edited by Benjamin H. Bratton, Nicolay Boyadjiev, and Nick Axel, features twenty-two interlinked projects that were part of the research. Published alongside are seventeen lavishly illustrated contributions by international researchers and designers that outline the wider scope of The New Normal program's output, held together by concise thematic texts contributed by Benjamin H. Bratton. Contributors include many of the most influential contemporary designers, philosophers, architects, and artists, such as Yuk Hui, Liam Young, Anastassia Smirnova, Lydia Kallipoliti, Lev Manovich, Julieta Aranda, Trevor Paglen, Metahaven, Keller Easterling, Robert Gerard Pietrusko, Molly Wright Steenson, Ben Cerveny, Rival Strategy, Geoff Manaugh, Stephanie Sherman, and Patricia Reed. The fields of research include Speculative Megastructures, Human AI Interaction Design, Protocols and Programs, Synthetic Cinema, Alt-Geographies, Platform Econometrics, and Recursive Simulation.

This highly topical volume, the only comprehensive survey of research and work produced by The New Normal program, will appeal to all readers interested in the future of cities and urban design.

In history of photography, new technological developments often provide a basis for new forms of imagery. These, in turn, are followed by new ways of theorizing the photographic image. For example, the cheapness and ease of use of the Kodak Brownie camera around 1900 gave rise to a massive movement of amateur photography, introduced the snapshot, and established a tradition of family photograph albums. Similarly, around 2010 we saw a rise in popularity of a new kind of image-making, image-sharing, and image-viewing device, which I propose to call the networked camera. This networked camera is a curious hybrid consisting of a smartphone with a built-in camera, wireless internet connection, and online image-sharing platforms and other social media. The availability of such devices have provided the technological basis for the formation of a new sub-genre of amateur photography – selfie. Selfie continues the tradition of photographic self-portraiture yet at the same time presents us with a radically new type of image that demands equally new ways of analyzing it.

Arguments put forward in this article are grounded in  research project Selfiecity (2013-2014) led by Lev Manovich and his research lab Software Studies Initiative.  This project was based on a dataset of 3,200 selfies posted to Instagram during one week from five global cities: New York, Moscow, Berlin, Sao Paulo, and Bangkok. Research methods included computational analysis (such as software-driven face recognition and use of custom-made data visualization tools) as well as formal and content analysis of each individual image. The article reveals some of the inherent complexities of understanding selfie that the methods and findings of Selfiecity have helped to articulate. Seeking for valid methods of theorizing and contextualizing selfie, the article attempts to combine insights from the perspectives of history of photography and art history, digital humanities, and software studies.

Since their introduction in 2008, software applications for mobile devices ('apps') have become extremely popular forms of digital media. Mobile apps are designed as small bits of software for devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, smartwatches, and other wearable devices. This chapter presents a sociological analysis of apps through the lens of three major theoretical perspectives: i) the political economy approach; ii) Foucauldian perspectives; and iii) sociomaterialism. Each perspective adopts a different focus, but all elucidate important aspects of the sociocultural and political dimensions of apps. Relevant empirical research is incorporated into the discussion to illustrate how apps are designed, developed, and promoted by a range of actors and agencies, and to provide examples of the ways in which people incorporate apps into the routines of their everyday lives. The chapter ends with identifying directions for further sociological research and theorising related to apps.

This course gives students the conceptual tools to understand diverse technologies, media, and techniques in relation to their different historical, geo-political, and social contexts; their different infrastructures and experts; and their different designs and uses. Since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in the use of digital technologies for remote work, education, health, and leisure in large parts of the world where they are accessible. How do we make sense of the difference between the "old" and the "new normal" of our technologically mediated lives? How should we examine the social significance of electricity-a 150+ year old technology and still inaccessible in large parts of the world-in relation with different engineering practices, political imperatives, electronic media devices, and infrastructures? How should we understand processes of technological "innovation" when users' creativity can seem as important as platform design? How do algorithms learn about us and vice versa?

To engage with these and other questions, we will draw upon some of the key concepts and debates at the intersections of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Media Studies, History, Anthropology, Information Science, and Software Studies. We will focus on different ways to understand how technology and media — mechanical, electronic, and digital — shapes and is shaped by cultural, political, and social values. Students will become acquainted with different conceptual approaches to understanding the interplay of technology and society (e.g. technological determinism, social construction of technology, actor networks, affordances) and how these have been applied to various media technologies.